


Lonely for the life you led

by gamerfic



Series: Ghost stories from Kate Bush songs [4]
Category: James and the Cold Gun - Kate Bush (Song)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Don't Have to Know Canon, Gen, Ghosts, Inspired by Music, POV Second Person, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-12
Updated: 2019-05-12
Packaged: 2020-03-01 07:25:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,835
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18795709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gamerfic/pseuds/gamerfic
Summary: James, are you selling your soul to a COLDGUN?





	Lonely for the life you led

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lunarium](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lunarium/gifts).



The recruiter who processed you into COLDGUN doesn't remember you at all. This isn't to say you didn't matter to him. The oath of service he helped you swear was an essential contribution toward hitting the metrics that earned him his merit pay, which let him buy a big soft bed to make his daughter more comfortable when her Winston-Fujihara Syndrome flared up and kept her from doing much of anything but lying there half-conscious in the dark. He helped a lot of kids just like you to enlist, for reasons both noble and foolhardy, and with as long as he's been enlisted they all blend together after a while. Four more years of this, and he'll finally have paid off the new legs the Hegemony bought him after Cephus Prime. Then he can go about the task of forgetting the rest of it, pill by pill, little by little.

Your drill instructor doesn't remember you either, which means you were a good soldier. The worst thing you can do in basic training is to stand out in any way, negative or positive, and you never did. Anybody who doesn't already fit the box they put all their recruits in just creates more work, and everyone comes to resent it even if they don't admit it. COLDGUN doesn't need inept, half-trained children playing at war. It doesn't even really need excellence, when you come right down to it. It needs stability and predictability in the form of a steady stream of identical soldiers - purpose-built gears to click reliably into the machinery of the Hegemony's endless expansionist wars. A conformist is the last thing your friends back on Newkent would ever have called you - hell, it's the last thing you would have considered yourself - but it's what COLDGUN made you into. It's an impressive feat, albeit a pointless one.

Your squadron leader remembers you, though. It was her job to know you well, to keep careful track of your strengths as well as your shortcomings, to notice which soldiers worked well with you and which ones irritated like a wrinkle in a sock. To make her unit the best it could be, COLDGUN expected her to put faces to all those same recruits it had tried so hard to render faceless. But when she sits awake alone in the middle of the night with a cup of black coffee at her elbow and a novel she can't focus on lying open in her lap, she knows they shouldn't have expected that of anyone. Nowadays, when she can't fight sleep any longer, her dreams don't show her rows in a spreadsheet or abstracted red bars on a graph. They show her the freckles on her soldiers' forearms, and the streaks of gold the triple suns at the frontlines put in their hair, and the things they whispered in their bedrolls when they thought no one was listening, and the way their insides looked after the enemy broke through the ranks and tore them apart.

And your fellow soldiers...If they remember you, they usually wish they didn't. They're doing their level best to immerse themselves in their families and their hobbies and their new government jobs and pretend their military service never happened. Some of them are too strung out on booze or narcotics or antipsychotics to remember much of anything anymore. Others have turned to religion, relying upon either the state-supported Church of the Guru-Hegemon or any one of dozens of schismatic sects and cults, doing their best to empty their mind and refill it with prayer and mantras and the thick heady scent of the sacrificial pyres. A few have even re-upped for another tour of duty, hoping against hope that the new tragedies the Colonial Occupants Legion of Defense - Galactic United Nations inevitably brings in its wake will somehow cancel out the old ones. And of course, too many of them never came back from their deployment. Those soldiers can't remember anything anymore - unless they ended up like you.

No, for most of COLDGUN, it's the people they left behind who remember them the best. You are no exception. Genie, who still deals cards at the Lucky Votive Casino, couldn't forget you if she tried. Most gamblers only tip her when they hit a hot streak and feel like spreading the wealth of their winnings. You always tipped her every time. You weren't the only man who did - and it was always men, of course, spilling their wooden chips and burnished coins across the green felt of the table as if a show of wealth alone could buy her affection. But you were the only man from whom she sensed no ulterior motive beyond generosity and kindness.

Even so, a baccarat table is no place to see a person for who they truly are. So she decided she'd get to know you better, half expecting to prove you were no different from all the others. You seemed startled the first time she invited you to have a drink with her after her shift, as if you were confused to discover that anyone might want such a thing from you. You were so nervous, so furtive that she thought you might not show - but you did. Conversation flowed freely between you, and the next time she asked you to meet her, it was much easier for you to accept. Soon after there was no need for an invitation at all. You were simply a part of each other's lives, as easily and naturally as if you had always been.

The two of you were nearly the same age, but to Genie you always seemed much younger. Perhaps it was because you'd had your mother to shield you from the harshness of life throughout your adolescence, while Genie had not been so fortunate. But your mother was gone now, taken unexpectedly in a shuttle accident, leaving you alone to figure out what to do next. The military pension Mama inherited from your late father, and you from her, was barely enough to live on. Beginner's luck at the casino would only take you so far. It was already well past time for you to figure out the course of your future.

You don't know why you didn't tell her as soon as you decided. You should have been man enough to tell it to her straight, instead of letting her spot you and the recruiter sharing a table in the very same lounge where you and Genie spent so many long and pleasant evenings deep in conversation. She watched from the corner of the bar as you pressed your thumb into the corner of the recruiter's tablet and signed the contract that signed your life away. The recruiter clapped you on the shoulder and spoke softly in your ear; you'll always remember the pride you felt then, and the pride you thought he felt for you too. In retrospect, he was definitely faking it.

The recruiter flagged down a passing waiter and ordered celebratory drinks, cocktails with real gin and garnishes of colorful berries. Genie looked on as he tapped his glass triumphantly against yours and you guffawed at something he said. Later, after he'd left you with an informational packet and a buzzing head and a promise to contact you with your ship-out date later, she took his place at the table across from you. "Why?" she asked you softly.

You shrugged, your heart still pounding with the thrill of an unbreakable promise. "Money's running out. I have to provide for myself, same as you do. There's no one else to do it for us."

"There are other ways to do that staying here."

"Not for what I'll make in COLDGUN. Come on, Genie, don't give me that face. I only gave them five years. People spend way longer at university."

"But they don't get themselves killed by going away to university." She stood up from the table, all but shouting. The other patrons in the bar were starting to stare.

You held out your hands in a futile attempt to calm her. "I'm not gonna get myself killed. This is how I'm gonna keep myself alive. Who knows, I might even get to be a hero of the Hegemony for doing it."

"That's what they all think," she said, and walked away.

Things were never quite the same between you again, but Genie still came to your going-away party. In a quiet moment, after your friends ran out for more beer, she sat beside you for the last time in the scuffed-up vinyl booth in the party room of the Cumulus Cafe, and half-whispered, "It's not too late, you know."

"For what?" you mumbled, already half-drunk.

"To find another way to live."

You didn't know what to say apart from, "How?"

"I know you're out of your flat already, but I could make space in mine. My bed is big enough for two. And the casino is always hiring people - in the kitchens, in the laundry. You could work your way up to something better, like I did. I know it would be hard at first, but maybe…"

You dropped your head into your hands. Both of you knew it was too late. It had been too late for a long time. "I put my thumbprint on the contract," you said, helplessly.

"James…" Genie's voice was soft and shaky. She put her hand on your knee and looked deep into your eyes. She might have been about to say more, but your friends came back before she could, loud and drunk and laughing and rupturing the moment before she could get the words out. What she might have said isn't important anyway. It wouldn't have changed your mind.

You never expected her to wait for you to come back - and she didn't, not exactly. Others have shared her big brass bed and done the things you never did with her. But she's never invited any of them to share her life for very long. After you, she always holds some part of herself in reserve, guarding it jealously as if it could be ripped away from her at any moment. You know you shouldn't do it but you still watch her sometimes as she lies awake through the long nights, adrift in the sea of her mattress. _It's not your fault,_ you want to tell her, _you were right and I was wrong but I was too foolish and proud to know it back then. I should have listened to you._ But she can't hear you anymore. None of them can.

You watch your old friends, too, as they gather in the evenings at the same parks and plazas and street corners as always. They're all a little heavier now than they used to be, and their hair is starting to thin, but otherwise they're the same gang you left behind so many years ago. Ed's boss is still an asshole, and Timothy still can't keep a decent guy, and Kellin is still working on his novel when overtime and the kids don't leave him too exhausted to think. It might be charming if it weren't so depressing.

They've all pitched in for a bottle of what they call whiskey on Newkent, a murky green-brown liquid made mostly of fermented algae. It gets them drunk quickly, which is all they really care about. They end up sprawled across the graffiti-scarred concrete benches of a neighborhood playground, passing the rapidly emptying bottle around as they discuss all the usual news. At a lull in the conversation, Ed staggers to his feet. "Where you going?" Timothy asks.

"I gotta piss," Ed replies. He stumbles toward a nearby brick wall adorned with a peeling COLDGUN recruitment poster and undoes his pants. A stream of urine cascades down over the Hegemon's gauntleted hand, outstretched in its familiar gesture of blessing, and onto the perfectly even ranks and files of COLDGUN infantry soldiers beneath his watchful eye and his imperial benediction.

"Hey," says Kellin, visibly uncomfortable. He always was more devout than average. "You really need to do that right on top of His Radiance?"

"His Radiance ain't here," says Dewey, who's been quiet until now, like usual.

"And even if he was, fuck him anyway," says Ed as he zips up. "James died because of his fucking war."

"James died because of James," Timothy says. He's said those words plenty of times before, to himself and to others. Maybe someday you'll believe him when he does, even though he never sounds like he quite believes it himself. "You'd have to be a fool to sign up for COLDGUN. Always was so, always will be. The Hegemon had nothing to do with it."

"Didn't he, though?" Ed half-yells. Somewhere in the darkness a dog barks, roused from its fitful slumber, and a yellow light flips on in a window of the apartment block next door. The others shush him, though together they're almost as loud as the original shout. Ed lowers his voice. "There's nothing out there says the Hegemon needs to take another planet. Or to make people like James go and do it for him. He could stop the war whenever he wanted to. Couldn't he?"

"You're drunk, Ed," Kellin says, and nobody can argue with him. "And I've gotta get home to the kids anyway. Come on. Walk back with me."

Ed puts up a token protest, but he lets Kellin lead him away. It's just Dewey and Timothy left on the playground now - and you, observing invisibly, unable to intervene. Silently, they finish off the whiskey together as they stare up into the night sky. The lights of the city and the clouds of early autumn make it into a grey and hazy canopy, blotting out the stars and shrouding the moons. Somewhere up there are the shipyards, and the COLDGUN personnel processing and transfer station. Beyond that are the training facilities, and the fortress ships, and the outposts, and the edges of the Hegemony that COLDGUN eternally struggles to push beyond, and all the rest of known and unknown space. It's all equally invisible to the people on Newkent, who live their whole lives under their own smothering blanket of foggy night. Nothing that goes on up there has to matter at all to anyone down here unless they decide to make it matter.

At last it's Dewey who speaks. "Tim?"

"Yeah?"

"You really think it's such a bad idea, signing on with COLDGUN?"

"Yeah, Dewey, I do." Timothy sits up, squinting toward his friend through the heavy dark. "Don't tell me you're thinking about…?"

"Joining up? Yeah, I am."

"Even after what happened to James?"

"What happened to James won't happen to me. I've been talking to my recruiter about it. I've got skills he didn't have. Skills they want to use outside the infantry. I won't go straight to the front lines like he did. I'll use the recruitment bonus to pay off all my debt, and once I'm in I'll get trained to do stuff they can't teach about me here. It's only five years, right? And when I get out I can finally make something of myself. I'm not gonna live and die stuck forever on this stupid planet. I'm gonna be a hero, Tim. I know it in my bones."

"Hmm," says Timothy, and nothing more before he lapses into silence again, leaning back against the crumbling wall behind him. You want to shake him, to shout at him until he shouts right back at Dewey and stops him from putting his thumb in the little box and giving everything away to COLDGUN. But the shock and anger your loved ones expressed never made a difference for you, and it won't make a difference for Dewey either. Like you, he won't know this mistake is a mistake until he's already made it. Only the Hegemon ending the wars would truly make a difference - and the chance of the wars ending is as likely as you coming back to life to stand in Dewey's way.

If you could speak to the ones you left behind, instead of helplessly observing them from whatever cruel afterlife you've found yourself in, maybe you would know the magic words to change the minds of everyone who foolishly thought COLDGUN offered them anything but death in exchange for their young lives. _Don't do it,_ you might say, _don't fall for the Hegemon's lies. Don't believe anyone in COLDGUN when they tell you there's any meaning in selling them your soul._ They all think the same things you used to think: that all this endless fighting had a purpose, that leaving your home for the front lines would somehow protect the people you cared about. But those people were never in danger, and going to war didn't make you brave. You know now that the bravest thing you could have done would have been to stay.


End file.
